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Far Korelia

Here's a map I've been working on over the last few days. I like how this one is turning out, but I'm wondering what else to do to it? It probably needs a few more (or less) names, and i can always continue fiddling around with the coast, mountains, and forests, but I feel it's lacking .. something... Any ideas?

I can't really say what it is lacking but there's as few things I'd look into though. Most of your labels clash with their color on the background color. For example, the blue text in the blue water of the pale green text on green forest. The creamish outer glow was a good idea but I would definaly change the color and add a small dark gray stroke or a few pixels to make it more readable.

I think the blue text works, but I agree that the green text doesn't. I originally had a white outer glow for all of the black text, but i got rid of it because it dominated the map too much. I've been playing around with the fonts a fair bit - i want something a bit fancy, yet clear. The smallest text is at 6pts. Originally it was bigger, but it took up too much room! Now it's about as small as it can go and still be basically legible.

I like the blue text. What about a darker green for the forests, with a wider and much more subtle outer glow? Like tune it down to 25-35% and make it 20 or 30 pixels wide instead of the standard 5 pixels? You can get some interesting effects that way. Maybe try the same thing on the black text.

Overall I really like this map though; the colors look great, the layout is cool, and your biomes and rivers seem to make sense. The only other real critique I have is that the blue stroke around your coastlines looks very pixellated. How would it look if you gave it a slight blur? That's pretty minor though, and it works fine as is.

I've change the colour of the forest text to black and given it a size 5 green outerglow. It's looking better already.
That's an interesting comment about the coastline. At the moment it's a 1pt stroke at 100%... I've dropped it down to 25%, and maybe it does look better? I'll have to leave it for a bit and see how i like it later. Changing the blend mode to screen at 25% also looks good.
*fiddle fiddle*